Jem stared into the nothingness above her childhood bed and inhaled deeply. Her old bedroom still felt like a bolthole – a pocket of refuge in the middle of whatever mess their family was dealing with. She used to spend so much time in here, hiding out. Maybe that was why she’d been so rubbish at sneaking around downstairs back when her mum had kept on busting her in the kitchen – not enough practice.
Jem rolled over onto her side and looked across her bedroom bathed in twilight. Uh, now she couldn’t stop thinking about peanut butter. Maybe she could she make it down to the kitchen without disturbing Dad across the hall? She was more gentle-footed now. Her legs twitched, ready to give it a shot but then she remembered the new pup down there. The thing got all excited as soon as anyone looked at her, Dad would wake up and it wasn’t fair on him. He’d been awake half the night too, floorboards creaking under his restless pacing.
Jem’s legs twitched again. She felt a sudden need to get out of the farmhouse and get to Kerring General, just as she had the last time tragedy had hit here. When they’d brought Alex home from the Old Girl, soaking and catatonic. Alex had looked like a little wet ghost, Dill’s bow and arrows clamped in her taut hands. Just one more minute with Dill, it was all Jem had wanted, so she could take it all back, all those awful things she’d said to him that morning and tell him the truth instead. But they all just kept saying the same thing, over and over; it’s too late.
Jem wriggled down into the bedding and let her thoughts travel back to the hospital. You have to wake up, Mum, she thought anxiously. You have to be OK and you have to wake up. So I can drop my bomb on you.
Jem squeezed her eyes closed beneath the covers. In the long dark hours of the night, she’d made a vow. No more hiding, no more lies. They had a right to know. She’d tell Mum first, then Alex and Dad. Maybe it would be Dad who would try frogmarching Jem off to Dr Bullock PsychD’s office this time.
Jem flinched at the recollection of her very brief spell in therapy. Pleading had been a complete waste of breath at the time, obviously. ‘Of course you don’t need to see a shrink, Jem,’ her mum had carefully nudged, ‘but it can’t hurt just to get a few things off your chest, can it? Think of it like tidying your room.’ But Jem didn’t like a tidy room, thanks. She liked a bombsite nobody dared or desired to enter and wanted her jumbled little mind to be left just so too. Sleep was for wimps, anyway, she was fine as she was. Jem had been all set for hiding out behind one of the waterfalls up at Godric’s Gorge and dodging the appointment altogether, but then her mum had given her that look. It had stilled Jem. Dill had gone. Then Alex. Jem had known instantly what that look had meant. Please don’t let me lose this kid too. Anything was preferable to seeing her mum look that way again, even an hour with Dr Bullock.
‘I feel that Jem is likely suffering from delayed anxiety. It’s only just been a year since your son’s death, Mrs Foster. Grief can manifest itself months, sometime years, later in all sorts of ways.’
Jem shook her head against the pillow. Nitwit. Dr Bullock hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d been Jem’s unwitting accomplice.
‘The sleep issues have coincided with your sister Alexandra’s leaving for university, haven’t they?’ he’d asked. ‘The start of the Autumn term? Detachment issues? Fear of another sibling leaving the family home? All very explicable.’ All very perceptive of the doctor. Only he’d missed that the sleeplessness had also coincided with the Autumn term at Eilidh High too, and the return of two bus journeys a day with Carrie’s crew.
It had been a lot like being stuck on the school bus, trundling sluggishly through her own psychoanalysis, sitting politely while Dr Bullock made all the necessary stops on the way to his grand resolution. The friend conversation, the boyfriend conversation, the drastic-new-hair conversation. Jem had felt an inexplicable sense of relief when they’d finally gotten around to the Dill conversation.
Spilling about her argument with Dill in the days before the accident had been easy. Even sharing how she’d never thought those jagged words she’d thrown at him would be the last ones Dill would ever hear her say. She hadn’t meant to talk so much about that, but she had to give them something. And it had felt good almost, like loosening your fist and realising that your fingernails had been sticking into your palms all that time without you knowing. Her mum had nodded, as if it had all made perfect sense. This was something Blythe could work with; there was light at the end of the tunnel. Jem knew her mum had never suspected that Jem’s opening up had been an exercise in frugality. Give a little here so that the bigger things could be held back.
Jem remembered her mum’s locket pressing uncomfortably against her ear as Blythe had locked Jem in an embrace in the car park afterwards. She remembered feeling her mother’s fingers deftly teasing strands of Jem’s new hairstyle and she’d known that Blythe was mourning the loss of something more than her little girl’s hair.
‘Jem? I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us, OK? Secrets can pull people apart. Even little ones,’ Blythe had whispered.
Jem could have just said it. Right then. It had practically been a green light situation for sinking bad news. The words had been there, on the tip of her tongue. But then she’d felt the cold press of that tiny locket again, she’d pictured the little photographs it held inside of her conventional parents and their conventional marriage, and the truth had dissolved like sugar on her tongue.
‘OK, Mum,’ Jem had said. ‘No more secrets.’
Alex slowed for the approaching turnoff to Godric’s Gorge and the run of waterfalls after which the town was named. She knew the road by heart, how many dusty laybys there were to allow the occasional passing car making its way to or from the falls, the cluster of properties that lined the dusty track there and each of the families who lived in them. In one of those properties, the large cream farmhouse with the spindly wisteria her mum couldn’t get to grow right, Alex knew her dad would be awake already, drinking his morning coffee out on the front porch, smoking his first roll-up of the day. Alex let her hand hover over her indicator before settling it back onto the gear stick. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. The hospital ward wouldn’t let her in at six-thirty and Jem would probably still be sleeping up at the house, which wasn’t going to make conversation with her dad any easier.
Jem had accused her of being paranoid. Ted wasn’t awkward around Alex, he was just usually preoccupied, that was all. Running a garage by himself took a lot of energy, didn’t it? Easy for Jem to say, she always had something useful to contribute. Knew how to pull a conversation right out of him.
Alex automatically shifted up a gear and passed the turnoff for home. No point disturbing them this early. She followed the road down off the valley. Eilidh Falls high street was deserted, the only movement where great swathes of fabric in reds and golds fluttered lazily from the street lamps lining the road through the busiest part of town. Wait, was that a … ‘Bloody hell! There’s a huge dragon hanging off the Town Hall roof …’ Alex blurted.
Jem hadn’t been kidding. She’d told Alex about Mayor Sinclair’s ramping up of the annual Eilidh Viking Festival a few times but it had never appealed, not that Alex had really grasped just how far the town had taken to gearing up for the festival, loosely based on the arrival of marauding Vikings to the area some 1200 years before.
‘Viking Fest is gonna be a national treasure eventually, Al. Like the cheese rolling in Gloucester!’
Alex let her eyes follow an endless run of circular shields all along the old library gates as she drove past. ‘Flipping heck … It looks like something off the history channel … on acid.’
Alex let her foot off the accelerator to take a slower look at the settlement of re-enactment tents down by the riverbank. Were they supposed to be the Anglo-Saxon presence then? A